muted the sound on the television and then settled back on the couch facing her. “It’s the defiance,” he said.
Avery said, “I think it’s stirring.” When Grant didn’t keep up the conversation, she added, “Don’t you think?”
Grant watched her long enough to make Avery uncomfortable. Finally he said, “I think there’s something special about you.”
Before the words were fully out of his mouth, Avery half laughed, half snorted—a dismissive response that happened without thought, mostly out of surprise. “Did you tell Melanie that tonight, that there was something special about her?”
“No,” he said. “Did you tell Zach he was special?”
Avery considered getting up and going back to her room. Instead she said, “I’m just trying to be friendly.”
“Really?” Grant turned back to the television and clicked on the sound. In a moment, he seemed absorbed again in the movie.
“Dude,” she said, “you’re majorly fucked up.”
Grant didn’t look at her but laughed quietly. “Dude,” he said, under his breath. “Majorly,” he added.
Avery got up slowly, hoping the right rebuke would come to her, and when it didn’t she had to settle for a contemptuous snort that came off as theatrical even to her. She went back to her room, closed the door quietly behind her, and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark. Part of her wanted to slip under the covers and go to sleep. Part of her wanted to go back out to the living room and tell Grant to get the hell out of her apartment. Dude. Majorly. Jesus, what was she, fifteen all of a sudden? She heard him again, mocking her under his breath, contemptuous—and she had to swallow and her fists clenched into little rocks. The room approached and retreated in the throbbing light from her iBook, rose walls appearing and fading. The dresser top cluttered with makeup and jewelry, the Folly Beach pier, a framed Picasso print, a framed Dali: here and gone, here and gone. She should just march into the living room and ask him who the hell he thought he was, hitting on her after just having slept with her girlfriend, knowing she had just slept with Zach. What kind of freak was that? How was she supposed to react?
Unless he wasn’t hitting on her . . . though of course he was. I think there’s something special about you. What else was that?
In her quiet bedroom, Avery paid attention to the palpitating of her heart, the quick shallow breathing, the tingling of her scalp that signaled the approach of a panic attack. She hadn’t had one in almost a year. She had stopped taking her Zoloft at the end of the spring semester. But here it was, coming on, and now she was almost as furious as she was scared. Scared of the fear approaching, the way it cramped her heart and overwhelmed her so that she couldn’t breathe, but furious at the same time. Why should something like this bother her, why now? Though it wasn’t just this, it was the dream too, the dream of her father and the lake, and the weight that had settled over her afterward, the heaviness of being alone, unmoored.
She got up and turned on a light. With the back of her hand she swiped away the sweat on her forehead. On her desk, a thick art book, Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces, was propped up against her computer. She flipped through the pages until she came upon a quote from Gerhard Richter, Art is the highest form of hope, beneath a painting that looked like a blurred photograph of a young woman holding a hand over her mouth, looking either terrified or bored, all her edges jittery, as if she might be coming apart. She continued turning pages until she came to an oil titled Monk by the Sea, which was what she had been looking for—though not that specific painting, just something calming, peaceful, beautiful, which was a technique she had learned back when the panic attacks were frequent and bad: immersing herself in the right kind of image, forcing herself into it, pushed her out of herself. And it helped, this particular painting a gorgeous play of blues: light blue sky, inky blue water, icy blue land, and a lone figure in the midst of the vast blue expanse, but somehow not overwhelmed, solitary, not lonely. She imagined that she was the figure in the painting, which was not hard, and after a while her heart stopped palpitating and her breathing returned to normal. She bookmarked the page and turned off the light and then knelt in front of her window.
I think there’s something special about you. She had reacted viscerally—as if he had called her a whore, as if she would get out of bed with one guy and into bed with another. Though, now, kneeling at the window, looking out at nothing, she considered the possibility that it was all in her head, that he might have meant nothing like that at all; that she was, on a not very deep level, ashamed of herself for going to bed with a guy who meant nothing to her, who, if anything, amused her. She wondered if her reaction to Grant’s words weren’t more about her own unhappiness with herself and the uneasiness of her mood than anything he had actually said. I think there’s something special about you.
She went from the window to her bed, where she stripped out of her clothes and pulled the sheet to her neck. She lay on her back, her head propped up on two pillows. From the kitchen, she heard the refrigerator open and close, then the clank of a dish in the sink, and then, Jesus, she tightened up at the prospect of listening to him go back to Melanie’s room. She could feel it in her shoulders and her neck, the clenching against the unpleasantness of it, listening to him as he opened and closed the door and got back into bed with Melanie—and when he didn’t, she was relieved. She got up and looked herself over in the full-length mirror beside her dresser.
There she was, staring back at herself, the whole of her reflected in the mirror—and it was as if she could see only her thighs. She grasped the extra handful of flesh in her fist and then quickly let go, a little angry gesture without thought. She laid one hand flat over her stomach, over the pouch of belly that she never saw on one model in the whole world of television and magazines and movies, but most of her friends and most of the girls at the pool and the gym had at least a little belly, a little looseness or jelly there—and the older women, Jesus, clearly there came a point when all of them gave up the battle. But her thighs—they weren’t that bad, not really. Her legs were fine. Her breasts were nice. Lots of guys thought she was pretty. She might have to diet a bit. Just a little. She thought she sort of looked like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. A little anyway. She had the dark hair and the straight bangs, and the way her hair fell on the sides, lustrous and straight, to her chin, framed her face in three neat sides of a rectangle, which was the Uma Thurman/Pulp Fiction part. She had pretty eyes, a little bigger and rounder than most. Her eyes were dark and with the dark hair, she liked that too. She decided not to turn around and check out her ass, and then she did anyway. And there it was. Her ass. It was okay. She pulled on the same shorts and T-shirt, so he wouldn’t think she had changed for him, straightened out her hair, and then went out to the living room.
Grant was on his back, apparently doing leg lifts. He lay stretched out parallel to the television set, his hands clasped around the back of his neck, heels six inches off the floor. The way he was holding his feet up with legs out straight tensed the muscles of his stomach, the broad chest and magazine-ad abs clearly defined under the cotton of his T. With great effort, Avery could hold that position—legs out straight, heels six inches off the ground—for about two seconds. Grant seemed to hardly notice it. He had turned his eyes to Avery as soon as she had entered the room, and he watched her now as she took a seat on the couch, folding her legs under her.
“All I meant,” he said, “is that there’s something about you that’s intense. It’s like an aura around you.”
Avery gave him her most skeptical look, one she hoped would encourage him to drop the subject.
“So,” he said and then fell quiet and stared at her unabashedly, his eyes roaming over her face and then meeting her eyes and staring into them with a disorienting objectivity, as if he were examining them, as if he were a physician looking for signs or symptoms. “So tell me,” he said finally. “I’m a good listener. I feel like we could connect.”
“Tell you what?” Avery looked at him as if he were a little crazy. “What do you mean, connect? What does that—”
With a small shake of his head, Grant